BECAUSE WHEN IT`S REALLY DISFUNCTIONAL, THERE IS NOTHING MORE PAINFUL THAN A FAMILY : `AUGUST : OSAGE COUNTY`

This is another film that should technically come with a disclaimer. I definitely knew not to expect a light hearted family comedy when I started watching it (and even if you have done no research at all, this fact becomes blatantly obvious under ten minutes into the film) but blimey, I did NOT expect it to hit me like a sledgehammer. Not like this. Those who know how close I am to my mother and grandmother can easily put two and two together to figure out that this was not easy watching for me personally but I think the problem is pretty universal. This is a family portrait. A frighteningly realistic one of what goes on at the other end of the `family` spectrum, when all is not rose-tinted Hollywood bliss.

Barbara (Julia Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Karen Weston (Juliette Lewis) are three sisters. Ivy lives close to their parents in Osage County, the delegated family member who takes care of the parents while the other two sisters have, to all intents and purposes, made a dash for it, living their own lives far, far away. God knows there is stuff to run away from. The matriarch of the family Violet (Meryl Streep) is not the easiest person to get on with by any stretch of the imagination, so much so that she has pushed her husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) to his wits end. So when tragedy forces all these strong and disparate people with years of unspoken grudges to bear under the same roof, nobody can quite predict what the result is going to be or who, if any of them, is going to get out of this ruthless melee emotionally intact…

This film is based on a play by Tracy Letts and I have no shadow of a doubt that she had first-hand knowledge of the workings of a problem family. I mean at least one. I mean I say that, but hand on heart, how many families can really aspire to what the mainstream holds up as `perfect`. At one point in the film Ivy speaks of how she has lost faith in the whole concept of sisterly love. `Just random bunches of cells that are genetically connected` is how she describes herself and her sisters. I do see her point. I don`t see things quite as darkly as all that, but I do see her point. It is a tough lesson to learn – and not all of us end up learning it – but the fact is, in my experience of the world, that just because you have family ties with someone it doesn`t necessarily mean you get along. It doesn`t even mean you like each other. In fact, if for whatever reason you turn out to be not very compatible as people, your relationship may well turn into a special kind of seething black pit of resentment that you only see between relatives. This usually has its roots in the fact that despite, for whatever reason, you don`t like or don`t get along with the person you are forced together, time and again, sometimes for decades… I mean there can be upsides to this kind of non-compatibility, God knows I have my own share of difficult relations but this has, for the most part, taught me patience. It has given me the ability to look more effectively for the good in people. Because when you are `lumped together` with a group of people, it is actually quite rare that you are able to have a relationship with them spanning decades or lifetimes and be unable to see the good in them at all. Because let us remember, it is very rare indeed that a person has no good in them at all… It all depends on how willing we are to look for it. That`s what makes families so extraordinary for me. It can well be that you are like chalk and cheese, even with your closest relations, but somehow you make it work… Except when you can`t…

Tracey Letts finds so many little things to touch on surrounding this kind of difficult situation. She touches on how difficult it is to get used to the concept of caring for your parents… Violet`s mental decline is especially hard to watch, although it is hinted out that she has never been the easiest of people to live with. Then there is Ivy, the one who got left behind and couldn`t leave her parents to fend for themselves… The line between taking responsibility for your family members and sacrificing your own life is such a fine one sometimes and taking a step either way is more painful than words can express… It is this pain the August : Osage County captures so well…

So yes. August: Osage County is about families. The real deal. Warts and all. Good times and bad. It is definitely not a feel good movie, nor is it for the faint of heart. But I reckon, if we watch it with honesty, many of us, if not all of us, will find something from our own families in there somewhere.              

SURREAL TV : "NATURAL BORN KILLERS"

Having sampled some of life’s bitter truths with Kusturica, let us now turn to some light entertainment. As I was preparing for the review on this one I realized something… This film can be likened to a family fight. In it, under the direction of Oliver Stone, the cinema takes a massive bite out of its younger cousin, the television. And put like that I know it sounds a touch unfair, but really it isn’t anything the TV culture doesn’t deserve… I honestly feel sometimes that the “media” has gone completely barmy and could have disastrous results… And I liked this film because it is precisely this hypothesis that Stone explores. If the film is completely surreal, it is more to set us in the type of universe where everything is possible and where the more outrageous possibilities can be explored; this is akin to the sense of liberty the medium of animation affords… It also has the added benefit of rendering the film watchable; even though the amount of bodies that pile up all over the screen can only be described as carnage, the whole thing is so unbelievable it just doesn’t sort of you know… Hit you… (Excuse the bad pun)
Mickey (Woody Harrelsson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis) are “Natural Born Killers”. They love each other and they love life, and for them, “life” means rolling round the countryside, getting drunk, getting high and killing pretty much whoever they want whenever they want. The manhunt that begins is massive, as is the media frenzy. And of course the whole thing does nothing but get worse when, in a hail of bullets, the couple actually get caught. Now they are safely behind bars, it’s the press that wants its pound of flesh. In depth reports, close ups… The natural born killers love the attention, the problem is, they are NOT as dumb as some people seem to make them out to be… And the fact that they love the attention doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to use it to their advantage…
Oliver Stone’s attack on “TV Culture” is two-pronged. First of all there is the very obvious interaction of Mickey and Mallory with the media who takes the form of Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), the uber-cheesy reality-show host who thinks of nothing but his own face on TV and his ratings. And then, just in case you missed that one, there is the media in general’s “feeding frenzy” – Mickey and Mallory become super-stars overnight, their faces are all over the front pages of newspapers, morbid fascination pervades and as the audience we receive a little poke ourselves… Come on, admit it, you DO read all those gory stories in the newspaper… But there are also a few more slightly less-obvious attacks going on. First of all, as I already mentioned, the whole film is very OTT. So much so that the overly cliché characters in it just pass one by. But in fact these men, Wayne Gale, the police officers, everybody is the epitome of B-movie characters. So intelligently enough, the film criticizes what television has become by becoming rather disturbing itself. Here, the credit that is due must be given to the actors, especially Tom Sizemore as detective Jack Scagnetti and Tommy Lee Jones as the prison warden, one of the most laughable yet psychopathic characters I have ever seen on screen… Then of course, there’s Mickey and Mallory. In actual fact, what they are doing is no more than simply copying what a lot of us see in bad action movies all around the world late at night (I assume some things don’t change no matter where you go). Even though their love for eachother is genuine – as far as we can tell – the things they use to show that love (apart from the murders of course) are again all the old clichés we’ve all seen a thousand times before. They are not educated, they are not cultured, this is the only means they know of self-expression…
Oh yes, the movie may seem all innocence and light, however, Oliver Stone actually has a lot of scathing things to say about where media and modern culture are today… Just don’t get mesmerized by the fast- moving script, open your eyes and ears, and listen.